Sexual reproduction is costly to those organisms that depend on it, like humans. For starters, only half of the population can bear offspring and the other half has to work hard to make sure they're included in the future ...

(Phys.org) —How do organisms adapt over time? Do they evolve through a series of small beneficial steps as envisioned by Charles Darwin, or through a series of rare but large jumps? Or through a combination of both?

(Phys.org)—Evolution in very large populations of plants, animals or fungi can be predicted far less easily than one would expect. This has been shown by research at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University ...

Evolution is usually thought to be a very slow process, something that happens over many generations, thanks to adaptive mutations. But environmental change due to things like climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, ...

Beneficial mutations within a bacterial population accumulate during evolution, but performance tends to reach a plateau. Consequently, theoretical evolutionary models need to take into account a "braking effect" in expected ...

Working to better predict general patterns of evolution, a University of Houston (UH) biologist and his team have discovered some surprising things about gene mutations that might one day make it possible to predict the progression ...